Believe it or not, my Substack is now #8 for paid newsletters in the “Technology” category. Substack allows you to put in three categories. I selected Genetics, History, and Technology. Technology is the only tag that is being reported for the leader board, so there I am. I really wish there was a “Science” option, but there isn’t (I’ve complained to Substack about this).
I justify my inclusion there because I will be talking now and then about genomics and genetic engineering, and these are technologies. If I focused more on technology I could certainly charge more, since it would be industry relevant. But I really do enjoy writing about Zhou China and talking to scholars such as Armand Leroi, so I will continue to keep it a “dilettante’s corner.”
The leader right now is my friend Byrne Hobart’s The Diff. Some of the stuff he writes about is pretty incredible.
I recently took to Facebook to explain why my family and I are self-quarantining. It’s not just like the flu. But many people disagree. Many, though not all, are “MAGA-people.” Middle-American types who trust Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh. Where are they getting their talking points? Some of it is from Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. (the son of the President of the United States of America for example)
Here is what I assumed was going on: the editors at Recode were settling some scores with “tech-bros” with whom they had an adversarial relationship. The journalist who wrote the piece was almost certainly just a pawn in this game of middle-school level social competition and sniping. Underlings know what they editors want, and they’ll produce it. Trust me. I’ve been the target of this myself. Much of the media is dishonest manipulation and an expression of power. If you don’t know that, you’re an idiot (to be frank).
Ten years ago the tech-press was just a marketing and publicity arm of Silicon Valley. That changed with a substantial number of the tech-journalism elite becoming skeptical and antagonistic toward the megalomaniacal and somewhat crazy tendencies of the tech-elite (these tendencies are objectively true, though they are features, not bugs!). Much of the antagonism is now masked with social justice and Lefty politics, but ultimately a lot of this is personal. Journalists have power and influence, but not too much money and security.
They think they’re “punching-up” so it’s OK.
Today people are surfacing this Vox/Recode piece again to settle some scores. So I reread the whole thing to be fair. This part shocked me:
“That’s like saying you can’t come in if you visited Chicago because of the flu outbreak in New York City,” the employee told Recode [find someone to say what you want to say -Razib].
Some [“Some”, who? -Razib] have criticized comparing the coronavirus to the flu because it has a far higher fatality rate and that it distracts from the new virus’s severity. But the fact remains that, so far, the flu has impacted far more people [No shit. Exponents. It’s true. It’s disturbing -Razib]. The CDC estimates that 10,000 people have died from the flu this season, with some 19 million people in the US having experienced flu illness. Data from the CDC suggests that the flu is a greater threat to Americans than the coronavirus. Yet unlike the flu, the coronavirus is new and not well understood, which makes it especially scary to the public, including Silicon Valley’s elite.
What. The. Fuck.
This was, and is, technically true. But we all know this is misleading. In mid-February, there was some uncertainty and lack of clarity. Being cautiously skeptical would have been fine. But the tone of this piece is not sober. On Twitter, the tech-journalism elite made their views more nakedly clear. The “tech-bros” are weird and nutty. The coronavirus alarmism was an opportunity to get at them. This was middle school. Not objective analysis.
To be clear, I’m angrier at Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump Jr., Donald Trump, and Sean Hannity. People need to be calm. They don’t need to go crazy. But it was clear a long time ago this was worse than the flu, with high downside risk. Now many MAGA-boomers are now digging into the idea that it’s not as bad as the flu (and making life decisions that are agonizing for their children, like going on vacation because it’s cheap and no lines in airports).
Vox has some great journalists. I probably read everything Julia Belluz writes. These are big organizations, and there isn’t always clear communication or accountability. People differ in their opinions. But let’s be obvious what was happening above: some people within the organization were using “objective journalism” to settle scores. That’s what some journalism is. Now they’re trying to pretend like it didn’t happen. It happened. We will remember.
I’ve been a subscriber to Netflix for 15 years. It’s a small cost. There are months I go without watching anything. But it’s there. And that’s how I want it.
That being said, I just want to put it on the record (again) that I’m bearish on the future of Netflix. The proximate reason is that major competitors with deep pockets and huge corporate backing are coming into the field of streaming (hello Disney!). But the ultimate rationale is that I think Netflix’s “superstar” system in relation to employees is going to kill any ability to navigate a tough patch with all hands on deck.
Basically, Netflix’s culture is hyper-rational and takes for granted that its employees are similar. “Grown-ups.” This is fine during a growth phase, or when times are good. But if Netflix seems like it might not be the future, why wouldn’t all the superstar employees find better opportunities? And once some superstars start leaving, that will reduce Netflix’s prospects, meaning all the superstars will leave en masse, accelerating the decline. And according to Netflix’s credo, they would be behaving entirely rationally.
The company doesn’t make a pretense of loyalty to its employees beyond what they can bring to the table for the company. Similarly, the company won’t be able to lean on any sentimental loyalty from its employees if it needs to right its ship or seems like anything less than a sure bet.
I believe that the printing press was probably a major instrument in the emergence of European modernity. First, with the rise of Protestantism, and later science. There have always been geniuses, but the “republic of letters” was enabled by the emergence of printing. The importance of proximity, which allowed for the flourishing in ancient Athens, declined, as intellectuals published widely circulated works.
This sort of thing has made me wonder about the rise of the internet. Would it enable a new intellectual flourishing? I’m old enough to remember reading the CIA Area Handbook of Ethiopia using Gopher. The rise of the blogosphere in the 2000s presaged the rise of a new class of intellectuals.
Or did it? Down much of that discussion has devolved to Twitter virality. Young people spend all day online reading great classics for free, but usually, they watch Logan Paul on YouTube or someone like that.
The hottest phones for the world’s next billion users aren’t made by smartphone leaders Samsung Electronics Co. or Apple Inc. In fact, they aren’t even smartphones.
Millions of first-time internet consumers from the Ivory Coast to India and Indonesia are connecting to the web on a new breed of device that only costs about $25. The gadgets look like the inexpensive Nokia Corp. phones that were big about two decades ago. But these hybrid phones, fueled by inexpensive mobile data, provide some basic apps and internet access in addition to calling and texting.
But now I think “more masturbation.” Over half the world’s population is now on the internet. But there isn’t more innovation or scholarly reflection commensurate with the growth in access and connectivity.
And yet back during the summers between school years in college, I’d spend a fair amount of time haunting several IRC channels, mostly on UNDERNET. You met some weird people, some nice people, and some unpleasant people. Generally, my utilization of IRC was heavily cyclical, just like my reading and posting in USENET groups. If I had better thing to do, I’d go do them.
Perhaps one of the strangest things about IRC and USENET is a few people from those days actually ended up finding me on the web, with the rise of the paleoblogosphere. At least one long-time commenter knows me from a USENET group back in the late 1990s, while the RSS aggregator that pushes my total content feed was written by an anarcho-libertarian programmer and philosopher who I actually met first when he was a teen nerd in the Deep South.
That old internet culture is disappearing and becoming legend, just like the “homebrew computer” era of the 1970s was for my generation.
In the open thread, I made a casual comment that I’ve become a bit more skeptical of market efficiencies lately. Remember, in the perfect market, the profit of the firms should converge upon zero. Is this to anyone’s benefit? Obviously, it is to the benefit of the consumer. But what happens in the long term when firms can’t make any money?
This crossed my mind recently in regards to Craigslist. Craigslist is notoriously no-frills and reflects an aesthetic and functionally stuck in the year 2000. The founder, Craig Newmark, is a pretty weird person. The company has 50 employees and does not maximize profit. But Newmark and Craigslist have had a culturally huge impact. They destroyed the newspaper classifieds.
And yet Craigslist stays stuck in the year 2000. This was obvious to me when they went after Padmapper. Padmapper was clearly a service which added value to Craigslist. And yet today I wonder if this behavior by Craigslist actually allows it to continue providing the services it does.
Imagine that Craigslist opens up its API and all sorts of other web applications develop around it. What I can imagine is that Craigslist would become the locus of massive and highly efficient arbitrages. Consider programs which match buyers and sellers in a way which minimizes the “deals” that sellers can today gain from buyers who are naive. Perhaps instead of two people going into an exchange, an ecosystem of “runners” who would transport products.
My thoughts on this are vague and cloudy, but perhaps reduced efficiency and rationality actually means Craigslist can persist for far longer?
Unless you were sleeping under a rock today you saw what SpaceX did. I don’t really follow Musk closely. My friends in Silicon Valley speak highly of him. He shares an interest in some of the same topics I do (he’s a fan of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence). But in general on an analytical level I think he’s a long-term thinker who may seem crazy, but actually is simply less pedestrian in his focus than the typical billionaire.
T. Boone Pickens has given hundreds of millions of dollars to Oklahoma State University…with the majority going to its athletic programs. And yet to my knowledge, Pickens’ philanthropy has attracted less opprobrium than Musk’s focus on quixotic topics such as hostile strong AI. Musk is weird. Pickens just furthers the cause of traumatic head injury so that his fellow Okhlahomans can cheer on Saturday.
Today at work one of my coworkers hooked up the conference screen to the coverage of the SpaceX launch and landing. I had one eye on the screen…when I saw the descent of the two boosters which landed successfully. I literally jumped out of my chair and ran over to watch them land. It was like seeing a CGI “artist’s conception” of the future of space travel come to life!
As many of you know I am not a fan of Joseph P Kennedy II. When I was a child in the 1980s he gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives where he argued against funding for space exploration because of the opportunity cost in relation to social spending. His delivery was quite appallingly poetic from what I recall, something like “why must we take food from the poor so that spaceships can sail high above us?”
Because I was a science nerd with a child’s lack of understanding of the “real world,” where some people were poor and destitute, my reflex was very negative. I still remember Kennedy’s pained expression and can feel my rictus of rage. It’s a flashbulb memory for me. I probably didn’t appreciate the substance of Kennedy’s argument, but the spirit of it was clear.
Some might argue that we don’t need to make a choice. But what if we did? What if space didn’t return much on our investment?
These are fundamentally ancient arguments. In China, during Warring States periods there was a stylized debate between the partisans of Mozi, who we can characterize as a utilitarian, and the followers of Confucius, as to the value of frivolities such as music. Those who aligned with Mozi were fixated on human well-being on the most general and universal scale possible. Music and other cultural productions were pure aesthetic consumption which took away from labor which might otherwise have gone into alleviating human suffering. In the end, history weighed in on the side of the Confucians…with the exception of Communist revisionists in the 20th century.
Musk, and Jeff Bezos, envisage us as an inter-planetary (and perhaps extra-planetary) species. This is laudable so as to avoid the risk of mass extinction on a single “lifeboat Earth.” But perhaps humans becoming inter-planetary is like art? Perhaps it is part of our telos?
These are ideas explored in science fiction. In Against the Fall of Night Arthur C. Clarke writes about a human race which is immortal and geriatric, inward-looking and lacking the spirit of curiosity that defines us, except for a young boy named Alvin. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man prophesies a pedestrian future untouched by the chiliastic passions we see today in Islamic fundamentalism or the dragons of pre-liberal nationalism awakening from their slumber. Space offers a way out of these two visions of conflict and ennui. The eternal frontier.
There is also a deeper evolutionary historical framework for understanding why we are fascinated by the possibilities of space, crazy as they are. Our own modern human lineage was the first to cross over from Sundaland to Sahul. No matter whether you accept a new date of 65,000 years BP, or the more traditional date of 45,000 years, modern humans show up in Australia very early after their exit en masse from Africa.
These humans crossed 90 kilometers of open sea. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond proposed that Australia may have been settled by a pregnant woman who clung to a floating tree branch. Genetics tells us this is false. Oceanian peoples went through a bottleneck, but not such an extreme one.
The implication is that the proto-Oceanian people who left Sundaland for Sahul did so as a unit, impelled by some cultural human prerogative. We may think that going to Mars is crazy, but we know Mars exists. What would have driven these proto-Oceanian peoples eastward into the great blue ocean? And how did they go east during the Pleistocene, before seafaring traditions?
The lesson from prehistory is that modern humans are a crazy species. We journey across the deep blue sea into the unknown. To a great extent, this is irrational for the groups and individuals who engage in this activity. The vast majority of voyagers probably expired. And yet something within us kept pushing some of us until we made it.
In a different lingo, one might say that staying home, focusing on safety and comfort, is a local maximum. International space agencies and private firms such as Lockheed Martin were chasing the local maxima. That was safe and defensible. Only someone as crazy as Elon Musk would push SpaceX into an endeavor which was insane and likely to fail. And yet sometimes humans don’t fail, and crazy is actually saner than we could ever imagine.
In Robert Heinlein’s uneven late work Friday the mentor of the protagonist mentions that because of a possible collapse of technological civilization he maintains a collection of paper books.
This crossed my mind when I saw that Storify is shutting down. Or Kevin Drum’s reflections on the changes in blogging.
I’ve put a lot of content out there over the years. Probably on the order of 5 million words across my blogs. Some publications here and there. Lots of tweets. But very little of it will persist into future generations. Digital is evanescent.
The explanation at the time was that people were moving conversations to Facebook. Today we would add Twitter and Reddit to the list of “culprits.”
But there’s another thing that is hard to ignore: about half the traffic that comes to this website is now on iOS or Android. That is, half the traffic to this domain is mobile.
I’m pretty sure that the nature of browsing content on a phone discourages the sorts of intense back & forth exchanges which were the bread & butter of comments sections of weblogs in the days of yore.
One of the more convenient things with having a blog that has more than a few readers is that you can ask questions and get some answers.
Recently I was figuring out whether I’d go full-Apple, and get an iPhone. I got a lot of feedback, but ultimately I decided to to be boring and get a Samsung Galaxy S8.
The verdict? Bixby sucks. Everything else is pretty good. Would recommend.
Believe it or not, my Substack is now #8 for paid newsletters in the “Technology” category. Substack allows you to put in three categories. I selected Genetics, History, and Technology. Technology is the only tag that is being reported for the leader board, so there I am. I really wish there was a “Science” option, but there isn’t (I’ve complained to Substack about this).
Interesting piece channeling some early internet nostalgia, 
There is also a deeper evolutionary historical framework for understanding why we are fascinated by the possibilities of space, crazy as they are. Our own modern human lineage was the first to cross over from Sundaland to Sahul. No matter whether you accept a new date of 65,000 years BP, or the more traditional date of 45,000 years, modern humans show up in Australia very early after their exit en masse from Africa.
Back when this domain received about 15 or 20 percent of the traffic it now receives there were many more commenters. What happened? One of the reasons the 